The history of the universe — from the Big Bang to the end of the year — day by day

Tag Archives: demic expansions

Farming is now spreading out of the Fertile Crescent. Farmers have crossed the Aegean, and appear in the Balkans and Greece. (They got to Cyprus more than a thousand years earlier.) Farmers have also begun spreading out of the Yellow River and Yangzi River valleys in China.

There’s an argument among philosophers of a utilitarian bent, started by Derek Parfit, over which is better: a world with just a few very happy people (more happiness per capita), or a world crowded with a multitude of people for whom life is just barely worth living (more total happiness)? The choice of the latter has been dubbed the “Repugnant Conclusion.” Whatever the philosophical merits of one possible world or another, there’s little doubt about which direction social evolution usually takes. “God favors the side with the largest battalions” (a saying often attributed to Napoleon, but actually predating him), and agricultural populations have mostly managed to replace hunter-gatherers, even though they are probably worse fed and sicker on average. The DNA evidence shows that in Europe it’s mostly replacement we’re talking about, not just the spread of new technologies. Migrants originally from Anatolia pushed aside indigenous hunter-gatherers without much interbreeding. In Western Europe the replacement wasn’t entirely peaceful. In the north, in what is now Germany and the Low Countries, farmers from the intrusive Linear Pottery (LBK) culture built fortified settlements, and there was an unpopulated no-man’s land between farmer and hunter-gatherer territory. Along the Mediterranean shore, farmers from the intruding Cardial (Impressed Ware) culture sometimes killed foragers, and kept their heads as trophies.

For a while, a decade ago, it looked as if the spread of agriculture might also explain much of the distribution the world’s major language families. Peter Bellwood’s book First Farmers made this case. According to this theory, the first farmers in Europe were speakers of an early Indo-European language that eventually gave rise to most of the languages of Europe, as well as Iran and northern India. We’ll see in days to come on Logarithmic History that the story turns out to be more complicated.

We’re now doing the history of the universe a thousand years at a time.

Glacial periods within the present Ice Age start gradually and end rapidly. The last glacial period began around 90 thousand years ago, and reached its peak, the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), around 20 thousand years ago. During the LGM most of Northern Europe and northern North America were under ice. Sea levels were more than 300 feet lower than today. Human beings in Europe were confined to refugia in the south, notably Spain and southern France. (Here’s a recent post on the genetics involved, with multiple demic expansions among European hunter-gatherers.)

In the period after the LGM, temperatures rise, the ice retreats, and humans recolonize the North. Not just Europe: people will gradually make their way into Siberia, and some of these Siberians will eventually make their way to the New World.

For a flavor of life during these times, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas is worth checking out. She is the author of two beautifully written novels set in this period in Siberia (Reindeer Moon, and The Animal Wife). As a child, Thomas was part of an expedition to the Kalahari, as recounted in her book The Harmless People. Her experiences, along with northern archeology, color her imaginative reconstruction of Ice Age hunters.

74 thousand years ago, a big chunk of the island of Sumatra blew up. It was the biggest volcanic explosion in the past two million years, expelling 2800 times as much debris as the Mount Saint Helens eruption in Washington State in 1980. Ash from the super-eruption is found all the way from Lake Malawi to the South China Sea. The resulting Toba caldera measures about 20 by 60 miles.

The Toba eruption coincides with a shift back to glacial conditions, and it may be that there’s a connection, that Earth went through a long volcanic winter after the eruption, which shifted climate to a colder equilibrium.

Did Toba have an effect on human evolution? Somewhere between 100 and 50 thousand years ago, human populations went through a bottleneck: modern humans are descended from just 1,000 to 10,000 breeding pairs from that period. It’s been argued that Toba wiped out the majority of Homo sapiens around at the time, leaving only a small group of survivors.

But the evidence that Toba is responsible for the bottleneck is equivocal. In some places humans seem to have passed through the period of the eruption without major disruptions. Also, there’s a point that gets missed in a lot of popular reporting: just because a species went through a bottleneck doesn’t necessarily mean that the population of the whole species ever shrank to that size. In the case of Homo sapiens it could be that the total population was always many times larger than 1,000-10,000. It’s just that the other tens or hundreds of thousands got replaced. In other words, we may not be looking at an external catastrophe wiping out most of humanity, and a few groups of survivors recovering. Instead, we may be looking at a small population of our eventual ancestors expanding and outcompeting other populations, so that it was our ancestors, not a volcano, who made sure that most human beings alive 74,000 years ago didn’t leave descendants.

This may reflect something special about human evolution: human beings typically belong to tribes and ethnic groups defined by distinctive cultures, and cultural boundaries (including language boundaries) often act as barriers to interbreeding. Several authors have suggested that this may make human beings unusually susceptible to population replacement via “cultural group selection,” and that this might account for humans having unusually low effective population size, as genes “hitchhike” along with expanding cultures. Interestingly, sperm whales, which live in populations defined by different song dialects (and other cultural differences) may show the same genetic pattern. And here’s me on kin selection and ethnic group selection, related.

In May 2015, the Toba volcano grew more active than usual, producing large emissions of steam and foul gases. Locals were reported to be concerned.

Something major happened to Earth’s atmosphere in 535. We have reports from around the world of the sun being darkened or blotted out for more than a year, and evidence from tree rings and ice cores of an extreme cold spell. The culprit might have been dust thrown into the atmosphere by volcano or a comet. This on its own must have been bad news for the world’s population. But even more consequential was what happened starting seven years later. In 542, bubonic plague made an appearance in the Egyptian port of Pelusium, and rapidly spread around the Mediterranean, eventually reaching much of western Europe and Persia. (China seems to have gotten off more lightly.) It’s possible the epidemic had its origin among rodents in the east African Great Lakes region: disturbances to these populations after 535 may have contributed to the spread of plague, either up the Nile valley, or to trading towns on the Indian Ocean. Recent genetic evidence has confirmed that plague bacteria from this period are almost identical to those from the later, better known Black Death in the late Middle Ages. The plague struck repeatedly around west Eurasia for the next 200 years, before disappearing. The death toll must have been many tens of millions.

Major movements of peoples would follow the plague in the sixth and seventh centuries. The Byzantine reconquest of most of the western Roman Empire, under Justinian, came undone as a new wave of Germanic barbarians, the Lombards, occupied Italy. The Anglo-Saxons expanded from the east of England to occupy most of present-day England. Slavs moved south to occupy most of the Balkans. And, most consequentially, Arabs under the banner of Islam occupied most of the Middle East and North Africa.

Australia can seem like the Land That Time Forgot. Australian marsupials were largely isolated from competition with placental mammals from other continents. (Although humans seem to have done in a lot of the megafauna when they arrived.) And many discussions of human prehistory assume that outside contact had little effect on Australia from the time of first settlement, before forty thousand years ago, and the English settlement of 1788. Populations just rose and fell with changes in climate and home-grown innovations in technology.

But there have always been hints that the story was more complicated. Some of the evidence comes from language distributions. The distribution of Australian languages is extremely lopsided. There are a lot of language families in and around the northern peninsula of Arnhemland. Then just one family, Pama-Nyungan, (distantly related to some or all of the others) covers about 80% of the continent.

This sort of distribution is seen with other language families, where it looks like the signature of population spreads. For example, three of four major branches of the Austronesian language family are found only on Taiwan. The fourth branch, Malayo-Polynesian, spans the world from Madagascar, to island Southeast Asia, to Easter Island. The explanation, supported by many lines of evidence, and almost universally accepted, is that Proto-Austronesian first diverged into separate languages on Taiwan. One bunch of Austronesian speakers then sailed to the Philippines, and thence to farther isles, their languages diverging along the way … and the rest is history (actually prehistory). A similar argument roots the Bantu expansion in the Nigeria-Cameroon border area.

So it looks like there was a similar expansion in Australia. Language change is hard to date, but it’s very hard to believe the expansion happened forty thousand years ago. There is other evidence suggesting a recent date. Some time before 2000 BCE, a new archeological culture, the Small Tool Tradition, swept over Australia. At the same time, natives began exploiting a far wider range of habitats and food sources than previously. And – strikingly – a new animal makes its appearance – the dingo, which must have been introduced from overseas. All of this makes it look like some outside contact, jump-started a continent-scale cultural expansion with new technology, and maybe new forms of social organization.

Just published work on Australian genetics suggests a complicated picture. Northeastern and southwestern Australia, separated by the interior desert, are also strongly genetically differentiated, reflecting a split probably going back sometime between 32 and 10 thousand years ago, i.e. well after initial colonization, but well before the spread of the Small Tool Tradition. But there is also evidence that the last 10 thousand years saw a population expansion in the northeast, a population bottleneck in the southwest, and some gene flow between the two. A scenario that fits the data would be Pama-Nyungan speakers expanding in northeast, and then some northeasterners migrating to the southwest, spreading their language and culture, but not arriving in such large numbers as to replace local populations.

We can expect that the picture will grow clearer as more data accumulate.

We’re now doing the history of the universe a thousand years at a time.

Glacial periods within the present Ice Age start gradually and end rapidly. The last glacial period began around 90 thousand years ago, and reached its peak, the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), around 20 thousand years ago. During the LGM most of Northern Europe and northern North America were under ice. Sea levels were more than 300 feet lower than today. Human beings in Europe were confined to refugia in the south, notably Spain and southern France. (Here’s a recent post on the genetics involved, with multiple demic expansions among European hunter-gatherers.)

In the period after the LGM, temperatures rise, the ice retreats, and humans recolonize the North. Not just Europe: people will gradually make their way into Siberia, and some of these Siberians will eventually make their way to the New World.

For a flavor of life during these times, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas is worth checking out. She is the author of two beautifully written novels set in this period in Siberia (Reindeer Moon, and The Animal Wife). As a child, Thomas was part of an expedition to the Kalahari, as recounted in her book The Harmless People. Her experiences, along with northern archeology, color her imaginative reconstruction of Ice Age hunters.

74 thousand years ago, a big chunk of the island of Sumatra blew up. It was the biggest volcanic explosion in the past two million years, expelling 2800 times as much debris as the Mount Saint Helens eruption in Washington State in 1980. Ash from the super-eruption is found all the way from Lake Malawi to the South China Sea. The resulting Toba caldera measures about 20 by 60 miles.

The Toba eruption coincides with a shift back to glacial conditions, and it may be that there’s a connection, that Earth went through a long volcanic winter after the eruption, which shifted climate to a colder equilibrium.

Did Toba have an effect on human evolution? Somewhere between 100 and 50 thousand years ago, human populations went through a bottleneck: modern humans are descended from just 1,000 to 10,000 breeding pairs from that period. It’s been argued that Toba wiped out the majority of Homo sapiens around at the time, leaving only a small group of survivors.

But the evidence that Toba is responsible for the bottleneck is equivocal. In some places humans seem to have passed through the period of the eruption without major disruptions. Also, there’s a point that gets missed in a lot of popular reporting: just because a species went through a bottleneck doesn’t necessarily mean that the population of the whole species ever shrank to that size. In the case of Homo sapiens it could be that the total population was always many times larger than 1,000-10,000. It’s just that the other tens or hundreds of thousands got replaced. In other words, we may not be looking at an external catastrophe wiping out most of humanity, and a few groups of survivors recovering. Instead, we may be looking at a small population of our eventual ancestors expanding and outcompeting other populations, so that it was our ancestors, not a volcano, who made sure that most human beings alive 74,000 years ago didn’t leave descendants.

This may reflect something special about human evolution: human beings typically belong to tribes and ethnic groups defined by distinctive cultures, and cultural boundaries (including language boundaries) often act as barriers to interbreeding. Several authors have suggested that this may make human beings unusually susceptible to population replacement via “cultural group selection,” and that this might account for humans having unusually low effective population size, as genes “hitchhike” along with expanding cultures. Interestingly, sperm whales, which live in populations defined by different song dialects (and other cultural differences) may show the same genetic pattern. And here’s me on kin selection and ethnic group selection, related.

In May 2015, the Toba volcano grew more active than usual, producing large emissions of steam and foul gases. Locals were reported to be concerned.